January 16, 2014

Source:The Washington Post — January 16, 2014 | Dominic Basulto

Ray Kurzweil has been quick to point out the remarkable growth that’s possible with solar technology. According to Kurzweil’s calculations, we can expect to be energy independent within the next 20 years.

In his 2012 book Abundance — endorsed by Kurzweil — entrepreneur Peter Diamandis makes the most eloquent case for why the sun is such an important player in any future scenarios of energy self-sufficiency. [...]

January 15, 2014

Source:Business Insider — January 15, 2014 | Kyle Vanhemert

After poring over the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists trying to figure out how, exactly, his artificially intelligent female lead should operate, Jonze arrived at a critical insight: Her, he realized, isn’t a movie about technology. It’s a movie about people. With that, the film took shape. [...]

January 15, 2014

Source:Mashable — January 15, 2014 | Adario Strange

Popularized by science fiction author Vernor Vinge as well as inventor and now Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil, the singularity is a theoretical point in future history when artificial intelligences exceed the power of the human mind, become self-aware and dramatically change the balance of power on the planet while simultaneously transforming the very nature of humanity itself.

January 13, 2014

A few weeks into the making of Her, Spike Jonze’s new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough.

After poring over the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists trying to figure out how, exactly, his artificially intelligent female lead should operate, Jonze arrived at a critical insight: Her, he realized, isn’t a movie about technology. It’s a movie… read more

January 13, 2014

Source: PR Newswire — January 13, 2014

With the acceleration of change, the uncertainty that once characterized the far future is coming to characterize the near future.

Some futurists, including Ray Kurzweil, are convinced that, by the year 2020, the rate of change will be so great that human minds will be incapable of encompassing or understanding it. It is true that this accelerating change dynamic continues to influence the telecommunications market in ways that… read more

January 10, 2014

Source:Los Angeles Times — January 10, 2014 | Steven Zeitchik

Inspired by the idea of the singularity — the term coined by futurist Ray Kurzweil to describe the merger of humans and sentient machines — Transcendence stakes out a middle ground between utopian and apocalyptic visions of the decades ahead.

“I wanted to get away from the cliched notion of a sentient machine taking over the world,” Pfister said. “Is it benevolent or malevolent? I want the audience… read more